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I've had enough with their shitty, unstable drivers. Fuck Nvidia. Their forums are completely unhelpful. It's a glut of people having the same nv4_disp driver has stopped responding issue and not a God damn word from them for the YEARS this has been a problem. I'm ordering an ATI 5870 and just calling it quits with them. The reason I hadn't before now was the God damn lifetime warranty on my 8800 GTXs that eventually became 285 GTXs after multiple RMAs and free upgrades from BFG. I guess they like to take care of people who've had their video cards burst into flame.

So, you're just going ATI? Their cards have finally started doing good recently, but good luck finding a lifetime warranty.

XFX ATI cards ftw!

Loving my 5870 XXX. Can't wait to get my second one!

Necronic said:

So, you're just going ATI? Their cards have finally started doing good recently, but good luck finding a lifetime warranty.

Click to expand...

Eh, I don't really care about that. I just want to play games without random freezes followed by my display dropping to 16 colours and the lowest res possible and being informed that the nv4_display.dll driver has stopped responding. Nvidia's drivers are just ass.

Shegokigo said:

XFX ATI cards ftw!

Loving my 5870 XXX. Can't wait to get my second one!

Click to expand...

Yup, that's, in fact, the one I got.

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150456&cm_re=5870-_-14-150-456-_-Product

Man, there's a lot of breakup threads cropping up at the moment...

Did you let them know by text, at least?

Frank said:

Eh, I don't really care about that. I just want to play games without random freezes followed by my display dropping to 16 colours and the lowest res possible and being informed that the nv4_display.dll driver has stopped responding. Nvidia's drivers are just ass.

Click to expand...

Heh, friend of mine has had the same pleasure, only he went from ATI to Nvidia because of it.

In any case, I hope the switch works out for you, at least ATI has the better quality/price ratio these days so that's a good enough reason to switch right there.

Frankie still has computer problems? Glad to see that things remain the same after I come back from my vacations.

I got nothing but sweetness with my EVGA GTX 260. I was a longtime ATI guy but their batch the last 5 years before I bought this card almost 2 years ago have literally sucked a dick. I actually had two cards that I was in constant give and go with ATI with their shitty ass RMA system.

I wish you luck though, maybe they don't suck a dick as much these days.

L4D2 stopped my monitor from getting a signal during the credits last time... next PC is gonna have an ATI in it for sure.

Eh, underclocking the card seems to have stabilized it greatly. At some point it had re-overclocked itself to BFG's specs (which are insane and about as stable as an Irishman after a 3 day bender) without bothering to let me know it had or asking me if I wanted my video card running 15% faster than 285s are supposed to at Nvidia factory settings..

Gruntington Von Hipposhit.

Dunno what to tell you. I switched from Nvidia to ATI a while back because I was tired of having to juggle drivers (this version for that game, that version for this game)... then I switched BACK because of the lack of options in ATI's drivers (or rather the lack of one very important option to me)... and ever since I got my 8800 GTX (and yes, it is the overclocked version) I've not had driver issues at all. Though I did have to get an additional fan to blow on it (and removed the OEM fan housing on the card so the additional fan could blow right on to the fins of the card's heat sink). Mofo does tend to overheat on heavy games like Crysis... but the fan solved that.

As for what my next card will be, I dunno. My 8800 GTX is still going strong. There hasn't been a game I couldn't play with everything turned up to max at 1650x1080 so far.

I have definitely liked the power of my 4870x2, but good god is that thing hot. I honestly didn't know that computer parts were designed to run in those kinds of temperatures (95C)

I went ATI a year ago and never looked back. Nvidia has a cooler logo. THAT'S IT!

no, I'm sorry that's not it. Up until the 4870 series N-Vidia had been beating on ATI like Tina Turner. And yeah, Stella did get her groove back, but don't count NVidia out just yet. They have better distributors by far, and history is on their side. They just need to figure out how to compete without just adding more and more layers of the same basic card.

That said....I love my 4870X2 (although it runs insanely hot)

The new GTX doesn't impress me vs the 5870x2 CF or 5970.

NVIDIA still has better OpenGL performance and CUDA is really tearing things up (such as in high-frequency trading apps), but ATI has higher precision (with the top-end 58xx series) and faster framerate, plus OpenCL may make CUDA irrelevant (except as a target language for an OpenCL compiler). It's still anyone's game, but ATI's certainly giving us the most performance per dollar right now.

--Patrick

i have 2 5870 in a crossfire setup. It is AWESOME

I stopped having brand loyalty in video cards with Voodoo. Now I get whatever's the best bang for the buck at the time of purchase. At the time I set up this particular computer the 8800 GTX was that card, but I have absolutely no brand loyalty to ATI or Nvidia.

Why do people care so much about framerate. The human eye can't tell past like 30-40 fps anyway...

That's complete bullshit I have to say.

I can VERY much tell the difference in smooth frames from 30fps to 120fps.

Chazwozel said:

Why do people care so much about framerate. The human eye can't tell past like 30-40 fps anyway...

Click to expand...

Completely untrue. World War II pilots were trained to recognized a wide variety of aircraft, and were tested to do it in 1/100th of a second. That's not even the limit of the best of the best.

As for an individual's eyes, on any given computer system, check out a program called FPS Compare (you can find it here). It's a simple program that allows side by side comparison of different frame rates. The difference between 30fps and 60fps is very visible to me, and I was surprised. I can play a game as long as the minimum frame-rate is in the teens, but that doesn't mean I don't prefer having higher frame rates.

Agreed. If I visit an area with 50Hz current, I can't bear to be around fluorescent lights due to the strobing. 60Hz is ok so long as I'm not moving. If I move, the strobing becomes annoying. I get the same problem with lots of today's LED taillights on cars. Move your head and instead of a solid red smear, you'll see a spotted trail.

--Patrick

figmentPez;381126][QUOTE=Chazwozel said:

Why do people care so much about framerate. The human eye can't tell past like 30-40 fps anyway...

Click to expand...

Completely untrue. World War II pilots were trained to recognized a wide variety of aircraft, and were tested to do it in 1/100th of a second. That's not even the limit of the best of the best.
[/QUOTE]


Well our eyes receive the information at the speed of light (even if it's not in a vacuum, i wonder if we would see faster in space).

But i'm guessing at some point we won't be able to keep up reflex-wise so it won't matter much. Heck, right now i maybe can tell the difference between 1080p and 720p for a video if i try, but if i'm just watching it i'd get about the same amount of info (well depeding on the size of the display anyhow).

figmentPez;381126][QUOTE=Chazwozel said:

Why do people care so much about framerate. The human eye can't tell past like 30-40 fps anyway...

Click to expand...

Completely untrue. World War II pilots were trained to recognized a wide variety of aircraft, and were tested to do it in 1/100th of a second. That's not even the limit of the best of the best.

As for an individual's eyes, on any given computer system, check out a program called FPS Compare (you can find it here). It's a simple program that allows side by side comparison of different frame rates. The difference between 30fps and 60fps is very visible to me, and I was surprised. I can play a game as long as the minimum frame-rate is in the teens, but that doesn't mean I don't prefer having higher frame rates.[/QUOTE]

Ugh...

http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm

At the end of the article: pretty much depends on your eyesight but at a point it becomes "all in your head".

Checking out that program, yeah, if i concentrate on one or the other i can see the difference, but if i look at both i can't. And of course that was at 1240x1024, and the difference becomes more pronounced as the fps values become further apart...

Chazwozel said:

Ugh...

http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm

At the end of the article: pretty much depends on your eyesight but at a point it becomes \\"all in your head\\".

Click to expand...

And that does nothing to suggest that the point at which it becomes "all in your head" is 30-40fps. There is a limit to what humans can see, but it's not down around 30-40fps for all people, and probably not even most people. (Back in the days of CRTs, I'd notice flicker below 85Hz. Even just walking past a bank of monitors at a computer store I could tell which ones were at the default 60Hz and which ones had been set higher).

Go ahead, try out the side by side comparison for yourself. See if you can spot the difference. I was sure I wouldn't, since I'd been gaming on old hardware when I first tried it, and didn't reach 60fps as a maximum in some games. I was quite surprised to see that it was noticably smoother.


EDIT: After doing more than skimming that article, I have to wonder if you even read it yourself. "To have a perfect illusion of everything that can flash, blink and move you shouldn't go below 500 fps." Five hundred frames per second. Certainly that's not the requirement for every gamer in every type of game, but it certainly debunks the idea that your link proves the human eye is limited to 30 - 40 fps.

Chazwozel said:

Why do people care so much about framerate. The human eye can't tell past like 30-40 fps anyway...

Click to expand...

Well, I'd like my framerate in games to be above 30. 60 is ideal (considering my monitor is only 60 hz anyway).

EDIT the second Crap that article is old. It thinks that LCD screens can only refresh at about 40fps, which hasn't been true for at least a half a decade in mainstream computer monitors. (Ah, yes, the days of 25ms+ repsonse times on LCDs, when blurring mouse cursors across the screen was normal for laptops.)

The author also seems to not know anything about how video games are rendered, and the possibilities of vsync and triple-buffering.

figmentPez said:

Ah, yes, the days of 25ms+ repsonse times on LCDs, when blurring mouse cursors across the screen was normal for laptops.

Click to expand...

Cursor submarining!

--Patrick

All I know is TF2 runs at about 40 fps for me and it looks fine and dandy.